You don’t have to look too far online to see more and more people using social bookmarking services and news sites. Content publishers from blogs to mainstream publications like Minneapolis Star Tribune are looking for ways to make it easier for readers to save and share content.

There are a variety of tactics including social bookmark links, icons, multi-purpose buttons, browser add-ons, bookmarklets, other tools and scripts that can used to encourage visitors to promote content. The question is, how are people using them?

When bookmarking or submitting a page to a social media site, do you most often:

TopRank started using social bookmarking as an active/passive content promotion method several years ago. In fact, here is a podcast interview I did with Rok Hrastnik in March 2005 discussing SEO, tagging and bookmarking. We’ve also been fairly successful at promoting a social bookmarking tool for blogs over the past 18 months or so, gathering 50,000+ links.

Leveraging the social behaviors and technology of social news and bookmarking sites can be very effective as an active content promotion strategy.

For web sites with abundant content, adding such bookmark invitations to web pages and other media can form a productive passive bookmarking strategy by leveraging the volume of traffic and points of contact. The momentum of thousands of web pages on the web, each with an invitation to save and share, can drive traffic and links 24/7.

Read an interesting blog post lately? Save it. Want to share it with others? Tag it and make it publicly accessible online. Or maybe you just want a safe place to save an article you will get around to reading on your weekly dive into your del.icio.us account. No problem. Social Bookmarking and Tagging both have this covered for you.

Social bookmarking and tagging arenâ€™t just about saving items for you anymore. Revert back to your preschool rules, and you will find social bookmarking is just â€œsharingâ€ on a global level. How else can you research and trade information with thousands and thousands of people all around the world in an up-to-the-minute fashion?

When talking with so many companies of all sizes and types about marketing with social media, many are keen on the idea, but don’t have a clear idea of the best way to incorporate tactics like social bookmarking into their content promotions.Â Anyone can throw up links to Digg, Del.icio.us and Facebook, but does it actually do anything?

The way I see it, two of the most practical ways to approach promoting content via social media sites such as social bookmarking and news would best be characterized as “active” and “passive”. In fact, there are many situations where both make sense.

The kind of promotion I mean is on social news or bookmarking service wheres you can submit a URL, describe and tag it, then others in the community can comment and/or vote.

Listen. Can you hear it? All the buzz about social media marketing? What you might not know is that with all that sound there’s an awful lot of noise. That difficulty manifests itself in the form of basic misconceptions, blunders and flat out mistakes when trying to participate and market with social news and bookmarking sites.

Here are a few common and basic social media news and bookmarking mistakes to watch out for:

1. Submitting press releases to social news sites. This is social media suicide, but there are marketers and PR practitioners out there endorsing the submission of press releases to social news as if it’s the same thing as submitting press releases to news search engines. It’s not the same thing at all.

Read/WriteWeb has posted an excellent review and comparison of the major social bookmarking services. Digg was not included as they are considered a social news service. The bookmark services reviewed include: BlinkList, Blogmarks, del.icio.us, diigo, Furl, Ma.gnolia, MyWeb, Shadows, Simpy and StumbleUpon.

The result? Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon were the clear winners. I seem to remember something a while back about how StumbleUpon Rocks.

Personally, I like tend to use del.cio.us the most for work and StumbleUpon for more recreational surfing. But I have found some excellent resources for work that way.

Todd Defren posts a nice rundown on using del.icio.us for an online PR initiative for bzzagent. Deli.cio.us is used to create content of value to journalists covering WOMM – the word of mouth marketing industry of which bzzagent is the focus.

What are we doing here? Providing any writer who is interested in WOMM with a customized research page containing the top news in the space, including first-hand reaction — on a daily basis — by a WOMM industry pioneer. For media types, et al., who subscribe to the RSS feed of that del.icio.us page, that’s a daily dose of Thought Leadership!

Piers Fawkes from PSFK sent me a heads up on his latest channel, Marktd which is a library of marketing articles weighted in importance by users. It works like digg or del.icio.us where users submit articles and others vote on them. Articles are displayed as “New”, “Latest” or “Top” based on votes. The categories range from BtoB to Word of Mouth with some Public Relations in between. But nothing about search marketing. Perhaps that’s a category that should be added?

Yahoo continues to push further into the realm of “social search” and the implications for search marketing is significant.¬† The editorial relevancy that comes with the links as well as tags from the web at large promises to make searching a much different experience than it is now. Hopefully quality is one of those characteristics. But how will search marketers change what they do to help clients take advantage of the changing nature of search relevancy?

Thomas (TwisterMC) has updated a few of our public tools for blog marketing.

First, the RSS Feed Button Maker has been updated with additional support for Textpattern, MovableType and Blogger.

Also, we’ve launched a new Social Bookmark Links Tool. This is a fantastic new tool that allows you to easily create links embedded with your blog post urls for over 30 social bookmark and tagging sites.

Why would you do that? Social bookmark sites like del.ico.us, digg, furl and others offer the opportunity for visitors to bookmark blog posts to a shared bookmark web site. Each bookmark by users is a vote for a page. Those “votes” can drive traffic to your blog post and can also help rankings since each bookmark is a link.